Patrick Comerford
I have done some idiotic things in my days. I wrote recently about how I once left travellers’ cheques behind and had to rush to open a bank account in Hersonissos in order to salvage a three-week stay at Mika Villas in Piskopianó in Crete.
But I have also left a camera behind, and I have left luggage and clothes at hotels in Japan and Turkey.
I jumped into a swimming pool at an hotel in Limassol in Cyprus at the age of 35, only to realise as I hit the water that I had avoided learning how to swim at school 20 years earlier.
I felt idiotic one year when I came down a tall and fast slide at Acqua Plus Water Park, the biggest waterpark in Crete, not knowing how to stand up in the water as I reached the end of the slide.
Some of my friends even thought I was idiotic at the age of 63 to take an early morning balloon flight above the ‘fairy chimneys’ in Cappadocia.
Perhaps it was idiotic of me never to have learned how to drrive. I managed to take about 30 or so driving lessons in the Terenure and Rathfarnham area of Dublin around 1978 or 1979. If you want to see idiotic driving or idiotic parking, simply put me behind the driving wheel.
On a sunny afternoon last month, as I was walking down the hillside from Piskopianó to Hersonissos, a sign outside Lofos Apartments reminded me how much words can change their meaning and significance when they are adapted from Greek into English.
The sign says Ιδιωτικός Χώρος, meaning not ‘Idiotic Place’ but ‘Private Parking.’
Today we use the word idiot unkindly to denote a person of low intelligence or a stupid, even foolish person. The word has come into English through Old French from the Latin idiota, meaning an ‘ignorant person’, and that in tuns comes from the Greek ἰδιώτης (idiōtēs), a private person, as opposed to the state, a lay person a private citizen or amateur as opposed to a government official, a professional person, or an expert.
Fyodor Dostoevsky had a nuanced understanding of the word ‘idiot’ in The Idiot, first published in 1868-1869. The title refers to the central character, Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, whose goodness, open-hearted simplicity, and guilelessness lead many of the more worldly characters to mistakenly assume he lacks intelligence and insight.
Myshkin is completely aware that he is not an ‘idiot’ in any pejorative sense. But most of the other characters at one time or another refer to him disparagingly as an 'idiot', although nearly all of them are deeply affected by him. In truth he is highly intelligent, self-aware, intuitive, and empathic.
He is someone who has thought deeply about human nature, morality and spirituality, and is capable of expressing those thoughts with great clarity. Dostoevsky is depicting ‘the positively good and beautiful man’ at the centre of the conflicts, desires, passions, and egoism of worldly society.
The word idiot was never used in classical Greek in a derogatory way to refer to an ignorant, unlearned or unlettered person. It comes from the adjective ἴδιος (idios), meaning one’s own, private, not shared, as opposed to public.
In a similar way, the English word ‘idiom’ comes from Middle French idiome, and its Late Latin source, idioma, from the Ancient Greek ἰδίωμα (idíōma), a peculiarity, property, a peculiar phraseology, idiom; from ἰδιοῦσθαι (idioûsthai), to make one's own, appropriate to oneself; and from ἴδιος (ídios), one’s own, pertaining to oneself, private, personal, peculiar, separate.
The word idiotic is from Greek Ιδιωτικός idiotikos, meaning private as opposed to public. It is only when the word is adapted in Latin, and developed in French and English that it begins to have the meaning it has today.
The term ‘idiopathic’ derives from Greek ἴδιος (idios), ‘one’s own,’ and πάθος (pathos), ‘suffering’. So, idiopathy means something like ‘a disease of its own kind.’
In medicine, an idiopathic disease is any disease with an unknown cause or mechanism of apparent spontaneous origin. With idiopathic medical conditions, the causes may not be readily apparent or characterised. Certain medical conditions, when idiopathic, notably some forms of epilepsy and stroke, are preferentially described by the synonymous term cryptogenic.
Pulmonary sarcoidosis is a typical interstitial lung diseases with unknown etiology that could be described as idiopathic. It is a condition I have been living with since at least 2008, and probably even longer.
Even here, the word sarcoidosis comes from the Greek σάρκο- (sarco-), meaning ‘flesh, (e)ido from the Greek εἶδος (-eidos), meaning ‘type’, ‘resembles’ or ‘like’, and -sis, a common suffix in Greek meaning ‘condition’. In other words, the whole word sarcoidosis means ‘a condition that resembles crude flesh.’
Meanwhile, if you still think it was idiotic of me to tumble down the slide in the waterpark near Hersonissos like that on a summer holiday in Crete, or to take an early-morning balloon trip in Cappadocia, all I can say is: ‘I did it my way.’
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